Who is the Real Terrorist Organization: Hamas or Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham?
Why is the US willing to embrace a Syrian government led by a bona fide Sunni Islamic terrorist, whose group — Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — has carried out more terrorist attacks and killed more people in six years than have the Palestinians in 25 years? The US government, along with most members of Congress, excuse the Zionist genocide of the Palestinians because Hamas is a terrorist organization. Last year I published an article using the statistics compiled by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, aka IFM, where the Foreign Ministry lists the number of terrorist attacks by Palestinians (i.e., all Palestinian groups, not just Hamas): The Stats on Palestinian Terrorism — 2000 to April 2024. If you go the the link for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, you will find the following sub-title:
1,521 people have been killed by Palestinian violence and terrorism since September 2000.
Because the US declares Hamas as a terrorist organization, the Trump administration, like its predecessor, refuses to negotiate directly with Hamas. Here are the two essential paragraphs from my previous post:
I have completed the initial cleanup of the data posted on the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which lists all suspected Palestinian terrorist attacks during the 23-year, four-month period (i.e., 2000 to April 26, 2024). During this period, the Israeli Government identifies 672 terrorist attacks blamed on the Palestinians. . . .
Now here are the really interesting numbers. 105 of the attacks are attributed to Hamas. 58 to Islamic Jihad and 5 to Hezbollah. In other words, only 25% of the attacks are associated with a specific Palestinian group. The remaining 75% are blamed on nameless culprits. The total number killed by Palestinian violence during this 23-year-plus period is 1,455. That is the number of victims listed at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs site. And, as I noted in my recent article (Hamas is a Third-Rate Terrorist Organization), the Israelis killed 7,065 Palestinians during the same period of time. In other words, the Israelis killed almost five times the number of Palestinians. This may explain why the Palestinians carried out “terrorist” attacks — they were seeking vengeance, retribution.
Now let’s look at the statistics for Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, aka HTS. That organization, which separated from ISIS, was formed on January 28, 2017. It originated through a merger of several armed groups in Syria, including Jaysh al-Ahrar, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, Ansar al-Din Front, Jaysh al-Sunna, Liwa al-Haqq, and the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement. This merger was announced as a strategic unification of major Islamist factions during the Syrian civil war. During the next six years — 2018 through 2023 — HTS was credited by the CIA with 674 incidents and killed 2143 people.
So let us compare: Hamas, over a 25 years period, was credited with 105 attacks, an average of 4.2 per year; HTS, in just six years, launched 674 attacks, which is an average of 112 per year. In other words, HTS was carrying out 27 times the number of attacks per year compared to Hamas. Yet the US embraces and funds HTS while facilitating the genocide of the Palestinians. Yeah, makes sense.
We see similar results when it comes to fatalities: According to the IFM stats, the Palestinians killed 1,521 Israelis over the 25 year period, which is an average of 61 per year; HTS, by contrast, ended the lives of 2,142 people, which is a yearly average of 357. While the Palestinians fight to survive the Zionist genocide, HTS continues to slaughter Christians, Shia and Alawites in Syria, and the US, along with Europe and Turkey, funnel money and diplomatic support to HTS. This is the definition of obscenity.
So the next time you hear some US official decrying Hamas as a terrorist organization, you are fully entitled to call out his or her bullshit. Instead of fighting terrorism, the US is enabling it. That’s the cold, hard reality.
If you’re still in the mood for some more commentary on the upcoming Putin/Trump summit, I did 45 minutes with Danny Davis today: